Becoming a thought leader with Think Patented's David McNerney

Published on April 17, 2012

Think Patented's Director of Sales David McNerney discusses why their clients look to them for answers first as the area thought leader.

My name is David McNerney. I am the director of sales and marketing for Think Patented in Dayton, Ohio and a real initiative for us and really just an overall goal for the organization is to develop ourselves in our client’s minds, in our marketplace as a thought leader and to become that thought leader doesn’t happen overnight and it means hiring some key people, educating some key people in certain positions. As our company has expanded and become this MSP integrated direct marketing company that we’ve talked about in the industry for a number of years now we can’t have the same sales rep go back into a client that’s been talking for 10 years and has been a gung-ho ink on paper print guy, come in the door and say boy I'm now an expert in mailing or I'm now an expert on cross media campaigns. It just doesn’t work.

So for us we’ve had to make some key investments in people, in education, so bringing in someone that’s a director of mailing where all they do and know and live and breathe is mailing and regulations and response rates or in our integrated solutions group bringing someone in that really understands web design and how that interacts with people’s maybe eyesight and following a page down or social media or again personal URLs. So for us we’ve really had to bring in these, I'll call them almost brand managers, that their job is to be an expert in certain fields and so for us it has really become pivotal over the last few years to team sale and work with our clients and our organizations with a team of experts in various fields.

Why we think it’s so important to become a thought leader in our marketplace is if I don’t then I'm like everybody else and then I'm a commodity and at the end of the day if I'm doing the same thing as the next five organizations they’re going to look strictly at price, but if I can walk in the door and impact our client’s business whether that’s increasing sales, whether it’s helping them get more efficient then I've become a partner and more likely than not I have a client for life and so for us it’s worth the investment of hiring these experts for us to transition into a thought leader because then the marketplace, the clients look to Think Patented first for those answers.

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